Re: pam_xauth

[a mole <mole pasdex com au>]

Hey Dean,

The timing suggests is probably happening when your crontab hourly runs
and it su's to news. (/etc/cron.hourly/inn-cron-nntpsend)  If you don't
have X installed then the error message is harmless.

If you want to make it go away edit /etc/pam.d/su and remove the line:
	session    optional  /lib/security/pam_xauth.so

It's kind of a 'feature' in the PAM module that assumes if you have no
DISPLAY environment set then you must be using ":0" - which in our case
isn't acutally true.  Doubly so if you don't have X installed.  This
assumption has been removed from later release of RedHat's PAM (see
rawhide.)

M.

On Fri, 20 Aug 1999, Dean Wilson wrote:

> 
> Hi!  I recently noticed that in /var/log/secure I'm getting errors from
> pam_xauth.  More specifically:
> 
> Aug 19 15:01:00 server pam_xauth[12499]: call_xauth: execve failed for /usr/X11R6/bin/xauth
> Aug 19 15:01:00 server pam_xauth[12498]: call_xauth: child returned 1
> 
> It seems to be running twice at the top of every hour.  I gather this has
> something to do with X, but I don't have X installed. Does anyone know
> what it's trying to do, and how to fix the problem?  (Is there something I
> should install/uninstall?)
> 
> Thanks,
> Dean Wilson